 So if you've watched my channel for any amount of time, you know that I enjoy challenging myself to new Linux experiences Or at least to try things on Linux that I don't particularly either enjoy or that are really unpopular for some reason I like to try those things simply because I do like to understand Why some people do like them especially when something is popular and I don't care for it I like to be able to use that thing and try to at least make it so I can empathize with those people and understand Why they enjoy using the things that they enjoy now? I've done this several times over the course of the last year or so and It has been very enlightening. I think that I've learned quite a lot So I'm going to continue to challenge myself to new and exciting things So currently I'm obviously on several other challenges the biggest one being the two-year Linux challenge where I've challenged myself to use The same distribution for two years. That's kind of to curb my distro hopping tendencies And so far that challenge has been going wonderfully. I found open Suza. I have a sticker to prove it I don't know why I always have to move the microphone to show my my my sticker But I do have to do that But anyways, so that challenge has has been going along really really well I enjoy open Suza a lot so that challenge has not really been a challenge on much because I've just kind of found a Home with open Suza So I've decided to challenge myself to something that's a little bit more extreme and this time I'm going to be using GNOME for six months now if you've watched any of my videos about GNOME in the past You know that I have a very Negative opinion of GNOME. I don't particularly care for GNOME all that much now When I first started using Linux my opinion was much worse than it is now I can at least somewhat say that I understand why people do use it or at least You know somewhat say that so what I've decided to do is to challenge myself for six months to use GNOME Actually live in the ecosystem because one of the things that I failed to do the last time I use GNOME was I just used GNOME that last time, right? I used it for 30 days and One of the things that I failed to do was I didn't live in the ecosystem because GNOME has like 100 or 200 different applications that they have available to you that you can download they they have things like a Matrix client that you can download you can download things Left-right and centered that are all GTK based and developed applications that fit really well with the GNOME desktop environment There's dozens upon dozens of them and I didn't really Understand that going in and I want to use some of that stuff to see if it kind of enriches the experience of using GNOME So that's one of the challenges that I'm going to do this time is to kind of really entrench myself as much as I can Into the GNOME ecosystem and that includes things like using the file manager I'm gonna use Nautilus for the first time probably since I was a budget user back in 2017 It scares the daylights out of me to be honest with you just a little bit simply because I'm a curse I'm a crusader user and if you know anything about crusader You know that that has a ton of options and customizations and all the features that you could ever want in Nautilus as well It's Nautilus, so I'm not expecting to be very happy there, but I'm gonna do it anyways We're gonna see how that works out We I may end up going just another a different GTK based file manager, but we'll see about that in the future So that's the idea behind this challenge But today and I know I'm five minutes into the video and I'm just getting to the point of the video But that's beside the point what I want to do is talk about some of the things that I've discovered so far that I really do feel like GNOME could do better and I want to be as constructive as possible with these criticisms because some most of them Honestly are pretty minor to be on just to be honest So that they're not like any show-stopping things that I've come across it I just can't you know get my head around But I feel like if these few things could be done better I might like GNOME just a little bit more So let's go ahead and jump into that before we do though if you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it. So let's go ahead and take a look at GNOME Now this right here is not what my traditional GNOME looks like or what I've been using for the last seven days As you can see I've been using it for seven days But I've disabled all of my extensions for now because I wanted to talk about first was Inconsistency because one of the things that GNOME does really well is that with their own applications They make them very consistent. They all look the same. They all function the same They all have the same Little bits and pieces that make them function and look very similar So for example the rounded corners like even here in the GNOME extension manager They all have four rounded corners But if I were to say open up Spotify if I go here to Spotify That's not Spotify. That's Vivaldi that this here spotify. Let's go and get rid of Vivaldi You can actually so if you can see the top has rounded corners, but the bottom does not now I have been told by people who are more knowledgeable about GNOME than me that The GNOME developers in their wisdom have left the idea of rounded corners the implementation of rounded corners to the developers of the applications and I can't even begin to express how bad of an idea that actually is leaving anything to Individual developers when you want a cohesive experience of your desktop in frame. It just sounds like a horrible Horrible idea because first off a lot of projects and applications don't get updated either very often or at all so anything that is Ill-maintained will never see the rounded corners, but also developers of Applications and the GNOME dev devs have to know this They all have to develop for multiple platforms have to worry about what distributions their applications worked on what desktop environments They're going to work on, you know, are they gonna work on a window manager all this stuff, right? They have to worry about all those things because they're gonna get bug reports from all these different places and Relying on them to make their application look precisely the way your your desktop environment is supposed to look Not going to be something that works out. Well for the vast majority of applications and Well, I've just shown you Spotify here. You can basically I mean, that's an electron application I'm gonna show you audacity here. So this is audacity. Obviously. I'm recording in it now But this has rounded corners at the top squareness at the bottom So it's not just electron applications that have that same problem I could show you many different ones that have the same thing going on with them is that and This is something that kind of permeates throughout the entire experience of them where you can see Where the GNOME applications the GTK applications are really polished and work really fine but when you download an application that Doesn't fit so well within the GNOME ecosystem. It doesn't look quite as nice. It doesn't function quite as nice now Here's one place where the plasma guys have done a much better job Now we all give and specifically me I give the Katie plasma guys a ton of shit about their desktop environment being buggy being overloaded the features all this stuff We've talked about it ad nauseam on this channel. I love Katie. It's fantastic It's a ton of potential for people who love the tweak stuff plasma is definitely where it's at But because of the amount of features that they bundled in there They have a tendency to have be really buggy, but one of the things that they really do a good job at I mean a really really good job at is making it so that when you use a Application from another platform specifically from GTK. It actually looks fairly decent within Katie plasma It looks like it should belong there. The GNOME guys don't either don't care about that or Just have not gone around to it or whatever the situation may be but when you use a cute application here it looks like a cute application and Not the cute kind, you know, it just doesn't look like it fits But even applications there are GTK, but aren't GNOME applications a lot of times they don't have all of the Necessities and the niceties of a GTK developed application from the GNOME guys Specifically things like rounded corners buttons all looking the same stuff like that now within the application I understand that that's the application developers problem their responsibility Completely understand that but things like rounded corners. There's no reason why and if I were to go ahead and turn on my my Extensions here. Let's hopefully I don't ruin the recording But I now have my extensions enabled now that I have this here if I bring back audacity You can see that I have rounded corners so it is possible for GNOME to force rounded corners on all Applications they can just do that and that makes the entire Experience feel more cohesive. It feels like there's a full thought behind the desktop environment It makes it even applications that don't really fit in with the GTK aesthetic feel more like it belongs on the GNOME desktop and Obviously if it can be done through an extension it can be done built into the desktop environment But they haven't done that so that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about the inconsistencies throughout the desktop environment is just kind of something that really stood out to me and Forced me to go look for a solution to try to fix that because it really does bug me now Obviously, this is probably much harder than what I'm making it out to be. I'm not a developer So even if I were to have a different thing in focus you can see That if you look at the audacity recording right now the Corners have not rounded have gone back to being unrounded because it's not in focus and so obviously Making some forcing rounded corners on all applications does have some pitfalls that don't quite work well even with the extensions So obviously it's much more difficult than what I'm making it out to be So I don't want people to say well Matt you can just assume that something is just click it a click of a button That's not the case. I understand Completely understand that but it's just Looking at something. I want it to be the same everywhere as much as possible And specifically when genome has done such a good job with their own applications making consistent Making it so all their applications that aren't part of that ecosystem fit in better would make the entire experience Just a bit better overall. So that's just something that probably the number one thing that I've noticed is that just that it's Not as consistent as that would like it to be so that's the first thing the second thing is let's talk about Extensions because I just enabled a ton of extensions to make my genome look the way that I want it to look so it brings the It takes the bar along the bottom or the top and moves it along the bottom has all these applications here pinned and stuff Again, so it's completely different out of the box and the fact that you can do this with extensions is fantastic I like the idea that out of the box it's just vanilla and you can if you want to find the extensions and Make genome into what you want it to be It's basically like if KDE took all of the stuff that makes KDE out of KDE But bundle all that stuff into a program that you could download and then make it into KDE again So you think you could basically build KDE up, you know block by block into what you want it to be With all the features that's what extensions are for genome is that it's kind of adds in the KDE-ness of KDE It gives you a ton of different options There's a lot of different extensions that you can just install to do all sorts of wacky things like add your own Application menu that looks kind of neat, right? You can do all sorts of stuff you can add a menu that has all of your system synthesis right here in the bar All sorts of things that you can add out of the box And I like that because it allows people to it's kind of like the gooey method of Doing a window manager if you will so one of the things I like about window managers a lot is that out of the box They're a blank slate most of them don't even have a bar You know you have to put all this work and stuff into making it look the way that you want to work Making it function the way you want to function Genome is kind of the same way and I like that but my problem comes in is that That it doesn't feel like a first-party experience right so in order to get the genomic extensions manager You have to install flat pack then you have to install the genomic extensions manager And then you have to download the extensions and then you have to do all these things a little bit But bit by bit in order to do the things and that's fine But if it were me and it's not me I understand that these are not my mis my decisions But if I were to do something the one thing that I would do is I would get rid of the Extensions application so there's actually an extensions application if I take right here This is the extensions application all this does here is allows you to enable and disable application Extensions that are installed you can't install them from here use if you want to install them You either have to install this application or you have to use the Genomic extensions website through a blart browser plug-in which is I mean just the fact that I say that just is insane So you can use this website or you can use the genomic extensions manager Which is I believe it's from a third party, but you can't use the included extensions application What I would do is I would get rid of this application completely just stop developing it Fork this thing or take it from whoever's developing it or have them donate it or whatever you got to do Use this one it does the exact same thing you can manage your extensions that you have installed You can turn them off you can turn them on you can uninstall them You can control the settings does all that stuff here, but it also has a browse tab So if you wanted to install any of the extensions that are here on this website You can just do that from this application and that's awesome That's the way that it should be so they should include this application Inside of vanilla. Good. Oh, I really truly do believe that that if they if they just included it They don't have to install any extra app, you know extensions or any of that stuff They don't have to even if most distros do in fact include some extensions enabled Ubuntu does this I think the only one that doesn't do it is fedora. The fedora is someone who prides themselves on shipping vanilla, but that vast majority of distros that Ship out GNOME as their desktop environment do include some extensions and Including this application instead of the other one that is much more powerful Gives the user the control over their desktop environment that they don't get unless they know about this application So by including it that you don't have to have them know about it. It's just here now I understand that extensions are Something that is controversial within the GNOME development community. They break them a lot It's just kind of the nature of the beast when a new GNOME version comes out a lot of extensions are broken and And and if they were to include this application and kind of really truly endorse Extensions as a first-party thing Then they would have to put a lot more effort into making sure that extensions didn't break because Obviously if you're going to update to the next version of GNOME and then all of yours all of a sudden your desktop breaks because of an extension Not great obviously so I can understand why they're not a first-party Experience but I still believe that they should be because it gives the power to the user of the desktop environment and it does so in a way that Doesn't force all of the options like Katie does Katie just gives you a Katie is the Absolutist when it comes to everything Options right you can do literally everything on Katie right out of the box You don't have to install extensions or any of that stuff It just all the options are there for you to play play with and obviously that leads to the bugginess that we always talk about when it Comes to Katie when I'm not asking for them to include all the options on GNOME I'm just not what I'm instead asking to do is just include this application so that People know that they have the opportunity to have those options if they want them now you could argue that GNOME is meant for people who are incapable of Managing their system in such a way that things don't break on them fine I suppose if that's your argument then GNOME it's only ever for new users if you want to be a more advanced GNOME user you probably know about this application anyways and you can go forth and install yourself That's an argument. It's fine. And that's where that's kind of where it seems like they've settled on But for me personally GNOME would feel like a much more Free desktop environment if all they did was include this one application not really asking for anything else That's I think that that would be just make you know a much more open feeling type of desktop environment as of right now You know obviously you have to install this yourself and it's just one of those things, right? So that's the second thing the third thing and then I know I realize I'm rambling on here but the Settings panel here is something that I want to talk about next so specifically I want to talk about the keyboard shortcuts because this is a little weird and The reason why I say it's weird is because not all the keyboard shortcuts that you want or might want to edit are here So by default Super and the numbers or when your window key and the numbers of your keyboard They will launch the applications if you have a docker panel, but that's what we'll do So super one will launch the first application in the stack super two super three super four you get the idea, right? But you can't change that by default so if you were to change if you're if you just search for super it'll actually show you all the things that have super and What I want them to do is have These bold ones here set for super shift super one and then I just want super one to be able to switch between workspaces you can set those but The ones for launching these applications in the panel remain you can't take them away now I've been told by some friends that you can use decomp editor to edit those things fine. Whatever I Consider that a workaround. I don't really consider that to be something that is first-party solution to a problem So my problem here is that not all the key bindings are available or surfaced for the user to change and What bugs me the most about this is that they've done the work, right? All of the work they needed to do is here so They've created a mechanism for changing keyboard shortcuts for basically everything and then they didn't take it to They didn't go the entire distance. They didn't take everything that you could change and put it in here There are certain things that feel hard-coded. So a lot of the stuff that has to do with super So for example opening the menu, right? If I didn't want the menu to open up with just the super key I can't change that. Okay, now usually obviously this is the genome menu not just our menu But by default the super key opens up the menu system. You can't change it And the fact that you can't change it bugs me now, like I said Genome is in the habit of making it so that you can't customize your stuff So that there's this whole idea of them knowing what is best for for the user and that's fine, right out of the box They've made these choices for the user to do things in a certain way That's the way genome has been has always been and will continue to always be that's okay Usually though when they've made a decision, it's either a it's a binary choice, right? They've taken a either they've taken a feature away or they've given a feature Those are the things that they've done, right? But in this case they have the feature and they've implemented the feature But it feels half-assed because they don't have all the keyboard shortcuts surfaced for you to edit Specifically a lot of the ones surrounding the use of the super key because the super key is very important to them They want to have it always so it's available for the menu system and bringing up the search The search mechanism of you know, I'm the ones that you would normally see if you don't have the extensions enabled Would also be tied to that super key So that's another thing that just really really bugs me and I would want them to at least make it so that it's easy for Things to be changed because they are said they already have the mechanism to do so it just would make sense I would think to put everything that you would need to change all the keybinds you want right here It's not going people the argument that it would confuse new users the argument that it would add too many features is just nonsensical to me because That's what a lot of people say when you you point out a feature that's missing in canoem They will tell you that if they added all the features that everyone wants they just basically become KDE plasma That's not what I'm asking for here. I'm not asking them to add a feature that doesn't exist I'm asking them to make a feature that does exist just a little bit better I think that there's a distinction there. It may be subtle, but it is the truth this feature already exists It's just not fully baked yet. That's the way I would put it so so that's just talking a little bit about the keyboard shortcuts and honestly probably not gonna bug a lot of people but it did bug me and Finally the last thing that I want to talk about is something that really now This just might be an open suzer thing I'm not sure but I've seen some of this on other distributions as well But when you install GNOME, you get more than one session and that's fine I was expecting more than one session. I was expecting GNOME Xorg and GNOME Wayland But what I wasn't expecting was GNOME desktop GNOME Xorg desktop GNOME classic desktop GNOME classic Xorg desktop GNOME Wayland desktop and a couple others So if I were to log out and go into late dm Which is my current display display manager and I was to go to the session manager drop down I would have at least six different options for GNOME that bugs the shit out of me I don't like said, I don't know if this is an open suzer problem or for it's a GNOME problem Now I have seen on other desks or other distros where they have several different sessions Usually it's Wayland Xorg and classic It's time for classic to go away. I'm just gonna put that out there right now I'm sure someone in the comments is like why use classic all the time and you're probably about the only one Very few people I would say use classic. They're gonna use the standard Wayland session and That's fine, and I know that Xorg eventually is going to wait right going away I am 100% okay with it staying As is because I'm gonna continue to use the Xorg version I'm using the Xorg version right now, but I can at least understand why Xorg and Wayland are there But the fact that they have multiple different, you know entries into your Excessions just bugs me. It just clutters things up. I don't need that. I really really don't need that and it did like and it makes it harder for Moderately skilled Linux users to understand which one they're supposed to choose if you're just using GNOME for the first time But you know enough to install install it you're gonna have all these sessions Which one you're supposed to choose right and it just clutters things up and it's messy and I don't like it Like I said, I don't know if that's an open Suza problem where it's it seems to have been especially bad on open Suza because I haven't seen it this bad on other desktop or other distros, but I have noticed it on places so it's just one of those things it really truly bugged me and I'm obviously you can't get rid of those things if you want to you can just delete the desktop file and the session will go away But the point remains is that by default when you install on a distribution that it wasn't installed by default You get all these sessions and it's just really messy So the last thing that I want to talk about is just kind of a little bit of a reiteration of What I was talking about earlier when it comes to extensions. So I like the extensions Mechanism they have on GNOME. I prefer if it was more of a first-class citizen where it felt like it was kind of more baked into The experience of GNOME maybe even moving it right into the settings application would work, right? I wish that it was more I wish it was it felt more like it belonged then it was just something you had to tack on in order to hack Your way to making GNOME work for you but I do like the extensions are available and Overall, I like the idea of being able to take something that is vanilla and kind of closed down and Expanding on it or extending on it if you will and adding features that you want So one of the features that I'm always gonna have to have is a system tray this thing down here There are certain things that run on my system all the time that I want to see if they run So if I were to close discord right now, I closed discord, but it's still down here Now obviously I've been using links long enough to know that if I want to kill that thing for sure if I want to kill it Dead, I have to do it in a certain way, but sometimes I don't remember I just click the close button, especially when I'm in a desktop environment and I think that's that this court is closed But it's not it's still there without a system tray. I wouldn't know that same thing with mail spring Vorta is always down there and it never opens up You know as a gooey application in my face, it always just goes automatically to the cis tray without a cis tray I can't know that it's there. So I'm always gonna have that. I'd like though that the fact that yeah Good home doesn't have this by default, but I can add it. That's awesome. And that's really cool Now obviously a desktop environment that comes with that by default is fine, right? I enjoy plasma and all the features that it offers But the ability for me to kind of piece together the desktop environment that I truly want That's what extensions offers and again if it was a first-class class citizen, you know, maybe like the desktop environment for me Because it does give you the option just kind of build it yourself It's like the arch distro of desktop environments. It allows you to build thing build the thing up directly from Vanilla, however, you want it you can make it look however you want and that's really nice and That's to be honest with you guys That is my absolute favorite Thing about GNOME is the extensions because it just like it makes me it makes it feel like I'm going about and extending my desktop environment to how I want it to be and The issue that I have with it is that it does feel kind of naughty It feels like they It feels like they don't want me to do it because it doesn't feel like it's a baked-in part of the experience if it was GNOME would be pretty damn good and I wouldn't be complaining about it nearly as much and if you've noticed in this video Most of the things that I've talked about are really my new little things inconsistent disease adding some key bindings to the key binding thing just so that I can actually Customize what the super key does all this stuff is just really minor stuff nothing Really all that bag. I haven't said anything about theming because I can still theme all that I want the theming community has found workarounds to make sure that everything works and looks the way that I Want to do and as long as they can continue to do that I'm happy with that. I don't need it to be an official feature Is in fact that kind of I wouldn't want Theming to be a official GNOME feature because I don't think that they would do it right So I prefer the community to do that and it works just fine So I don't really need to talk about that all of these just little slight You know pain points are What's keeping me from truly enjoying my experience And as I go through I'm trying to File away at those just a little bit. So they're not as painful You know as noticeable I should say so That's it for this video. I know it's been actually quite a long one I didn't expect to be rambling on for this long about GNOME, but This is a challenge and this is the beginning of the challenge I've been using GNOME for a week So that means I still have five months and three weeks left to go on this challenge I will be making some more GNOME videos in the future now, but I'm not going to overload you guys with GNOME content I'm not going to be making one every week even maybe one a month I'll be making something where where if I can find a topic about GNOME that I need to talk about I'll make a video on it But other than that, you guys won't hear me talk about it on the channel too much But at least we'll be talking about it some so That's it for this one if you have thoughts on GNOME and my challenge You can leave those in the comment section below I'd really love to hear from you you can if you haven't already Hit that like button. It would really help the channel It really does help the channel So if you would take the moment to press the thumbs up button I'd really appreciate it. You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can also head on over to the store, which is at shop that the linux cast.org There you'll find t-shirts and desk mats and hats and hoodies and Beanie's and pillows and all sorts of stuff all that stuff goes directly to help the channel And it helps me make more linux content So head on over there shop that the linux cast.org is where you'll find all that So thanks so much for everybody who has gone over there and checked it out and for those of you who will Thanks everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you The challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. Once again, I am behind on adding new Supporters to this list. So if you've supported me in the last couple weeks and your name isn't on the credits yet I apologize. I'm going to get to that in the next couple days. I promise Um Have become really black said doing this because I have a idea for something different that I want to do I just haven't been able to like get that to work yet. So that's the reason why it's not Been as good as I used to be but I'm getting there. But anyways, thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time